How can I search for a strings in HTML code?

INTEL · #1 (**permalink**) 02-20-08, 03:08 AM

Hello and thank you for reading this.

I'm using PHP Snoopy class to obtain HTML of a webpage.

Say I have

HTML Code:

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello</title>
</head>
<body>
My Name: Alex
</body>
</html>

If thats the data I have, how can I extract "Hello" and then "Alex"? I looked at split and explode, I dont think they would quit work.

Any feedback is welcome.

Thank you.

Nico · #2 (**permalink**) 02-20-08, 03:11 AM

Can the content vary? If so, in which way?

INTEL · #3 (**permalink**) 02-20-08, 03:17 AM

Hi Nico,

Thanks for your speedy response. Yes, the content will vary slightly. Mostly the values I will be extracting.

It would be ideal if I could say something like

START AFTER <title>
STOP BEFORE </title>

and have the value in between returned to me "Hello" in above case. So that if the rest of the code changes slightly changes on the page (say there is a dynamic banner), it would still work.

Thank you.

Jay6390 · #4 (**permalink**) 02-20-08, 03:23 AM

I think what you are after is a regex for that. something like

PHP Code:


			
$pattern='/<title>([^<]+?)<\/title>/';
preg_match($pattern,$pagedata,$matches);
echo $matches[1];

Jay

Nico · #5 (**permalink**) 02-20-08, 03:25 AM

EDIT: Jay beat me to it.

Try this:

PHP Code:


			

$content = /* HTML content */;

if (preg_match('~<title>(.*?)</title>~si', $content, $title))
{
    echo "Title: {$title[1]}";
}

if (preg_match('~<body[^>]*>(.*?)</body>~si', $content, $body))
{
    echo "Body: {$body[1]}";
}

INTEL · #6 (**permalink**) 02-20-08, 10:07 PM

Thank you both.

I tried the code and neither returned any values.

Please see:
http://projectserver10.info/parser/crawler/

Code:

PHP Code:


			


<?php



include("Snoopy.class.php");



$snoopy = new Snoopy;



// need an proxy?:

//$snoopy->proxy_host = "my.proxy.host";

//$snoopy->proxy_port = "8080";



// set browser and referer:

$snoopy->agent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)";

$snoopy->referer = "http://www.jonasjohn.de/";



// set some cookies:

$snoopy->cookies["SessionID"] = '238472834723489';

$snoopy->cookies["favoriteColor"] = "blue";



// set an raw-header:

$snoopy->rawheaders["Pragma"] = "no-cache";



// set some internal variables:

$snoopy->maxredirs = 2;

$snoopy->offsiteok = false;

$snoopy->expandlinks = false;



// set username and password (optional)

//$snoopy->user = "joe";

//$snoopy->pass = "bloe";



// fetch the text of the website www.google.com:

if($snoopy->fetch("http://www.Google.com")){ 

    // other methods: fetch, fetchform, fetchlinks, submittext and submitlinks

    

    // response code:

    print "response code: ".$snoopy->response_code."<br/>\n";

    

    // print the headers:

    

    print "<b>Headers:</b><br/>";

    while(list($key,$val) = each($snoopy->headers)){

        print $key.": ".$val."<br/>\n";

    }

    

    print "<br/>\n";

    

    // print the texts of the website:

    

    $content = htmlspecialchars($snoopy->results);

    

    echo "<pre> $content </pre>\n";

    

    

echo("--- CRAWLED INFO Method 1 --");

 

$pattern='/<title>([^<]+?)<\/title>/';

preg_match($pattern,$content,$matches);

echo $matches[1];  

     

echo("<br><br>--- CRAWLED INFO Method 2 --");



if (preg_match('~<title>(.*?)</title>~si', $content, $title))

{

    echo "Title: {$title[1]}";

}

     

}

else {

    print "error while fetching document: ".$snoopy->error."\n";

}









?>

INTEL · #7 (**permalink**) 02-20-08, 11:30 PM

Figured it out. I had to put " " around my variable. Thank you very much to both of you!!